Why I Write and Things I Picked Up in this Journey

I was born in Thane, Maharashtra, to a Hindu father and a Catholic mother, although they made it a point to introduce themselves to me only as a hardworking hotelier and a strong-willed mother (who, I would later understand was an incredibly capable civil draughtsman as well). When I was a few months old, my parents relocated to my paternal residence in Chennai. Within the next year or so, the situations went in for a complete toss, and from the well-to-do family based in Bombay we became the absolute strugglers, surviving on external help. It was in the middle of this and more that my brother was born. For the next sixteen-odd years, I saw my parents, my brother, and myself working day in and day out in every possible way we could to make ends meet. Twice my father invested all the finances that we could scrape together, along with the kind help of some other friends, into partnership ventures with people he had known for a long time, one of whom was his guardian during school, and suffered betrayal. Although the loss found us neck-deep in debt, I admired and continue to admire my father’s strong belief in remaining honest and selfless, even when he would have been justified in being angry or hopeless. He lived for us, my mother worked with little or no concern for her health, my brother and I did whatever little we could. This would eventually take the form of a major health issue, the aftermath of which continues to haunt her. It was the memory of those days that makes me believe that my mother is the strongest woman I will ever meet. She single-handedly managed to inspire an entire family from utter hopelessness and struggle to confidence and determination.

She was perhaps the reason why I am personally very attracted to the case of creating strong women in fiction. Although there are many characters, from Elizabeth Bennet to Hermione Ganger, that have caught my heart and attention, there have been four female characters whom I have always perceived as strong – Draupadi (from The Palace of Illusions), Hanako Ishigaki (from Like a Willow Tree), and Mariam and Aziza (from A Thousand Splendid Suns). And as I re-read each of these works for relishing those characters again, I started to realise that the main difference that set them apart was that none of them were particularly masculine in their portrayal of strong. Their ferocity does not come from borrowing the masculinity of the men around them, it came from within them, as women. We live in an era that speaks a lot about feminism, yet goes on to accept imitation for strength. It is crucial to understand that feminism, or gender equality, within or outside the stories, is about the freedom to make choices. And therefore, the choices need not be the imitation of their male counterparts. The flavour of strength in the female identity might brew in a different colour, but that need not make it any less competent. I learnt that if my protagonist is a lovely lady-next-door who paints her nails and goes to the parlour, it isn’t an excuse to objectify her part. Also, I learnt that it doesn't make sense that to try to make all the traditionally dressed women in the story become superwomen by some marked difference because you want to portray that these women are strong too – remember that there are many layers inside a single character, don’t just stick to one of it as a definition of that character. By making strong sound masculine, you are making your characters live a prejudice that would eventually eat into you and your readers, as people. And trust me, your readers do not want that. The key to creating memorable characters is letting them become relatable – and if hitting your reader on the face with the brickbats from reality is a part of that, embrace it.

Growing up as a girl in a fairly conservative family among many brothers, I found little or no encouragement when I questioned the patriarchal way things were at home, and had to sometimes suffer verbal bashing at the hands of the elders. But I learnt it the hard way that I had to stand up for myself; I chose the fight over being the girl-favourite, I chose to stand up by myself, for what I believed in. It was my choice and I put a piece of that into my writing. I also found myself unable to just silently accept everything that was thrown at me. I questioned, and thus made myself vulnerable to social isolation. I was groping in the darkness for company and I wrote because that was the only way I found to express myself and scream out everything that was bottled up inside of me.

My admiration for my mother’s strength and strong will took the form of a deep sense of inferiority in me. Her persistent struggle to make me be the best appeared to me as a constant confine. I looked at my brother; more perfect, more accomplished, more acceptable; with a jealousy that I could not explain. For the better part of the two decades, I remember myself wondering, whining, and crying myself to sleep over not being able to communicate what I felt within me. I wondered why I wasn’t the perfection that my sibling seemed to effortlessly master and contain; pondered over not being fun or frolic like my peers. I considered laughing a luxury that I was unintroduced to, and pushed away people when they got too near. I wanted to ask them how I could be like them. I wanted to know if I can be one of them. I wanted to tell them that it is not that I do not care. Just that I was afraid to accept the fact that I felt lonely mostly. I wanted to contradict the people around me calling me friendless and arrogant, and for which I myself had to firstly believe that I am not scared of the claustrophobic confine and void that loomed larger within me, so I pretended to be the one choosing, I pretended that I loved who I was; I pretended that I could genuinely spell and paint my loneliness in the brightest shade of wondrous solitude. I must admit I was wrong and the wet pillow on my bed and the pile of patient paper are all that I could bring to you as witnesses.

Taking refuge behind an alternate reality, I took to writing when I was nine years old. Almost a decade later, when I sat grappling with clinical depression, hating myself to an extent that I refrained from looking at the mirror for nearly two months, crying into the closed doors of my dark hostel room – days when my peers were genuinely scared of me and I was doing something or the other to hurt myself – that old companion would cradle me to tiredness and from tiredness to sleep like a stooping nurse to a sick child. My pen seemed to become the only thing that wasn’t afraid of the wild beast I had become to those around me. When I failed in my attempts at material death, I wrote of my own death – fantasizing, romanticizing the idea in my poems. When I loved and could not express it, I welcomed them into the realms of immortality with a bottle of ink. I did not write because I wanted to get published or be remembered, but rather because there was perhaps a story within me that pursued me to be written. I believe that I could only write because the story wished, urged, commanded me to be the humble medium of its birth and revelation. My guilt about distancing myself from my mother emotionally took the shape of Rukhmani in The Madwoman series; my unexpressed craving for her acceptance made me create Deepti in The Drunkard; and my defiance about my own pursuit of acceptance made me side with thatha in The Drunkard. What started at nine as an escape mechanism has been my best companion since. During my bout with depression, it dawned upon me that writing was that sincere comrade I blabbered gibberish to; it was the sibling I could embrace at will, a family as weird as myself, and a “me” I could much easily tolerate on paper than within. Writing was, and continues to remain, the reason which could help me survive when I believe that every other reason is insufficient. Incidentally, at 14, my parents helped me self-publish The Drunkard, and the kind requests from many readers offline aided me in republishing it on the online publishing platform, Launchora, in 2016. At 17, I started working on my ongoing series, The Madwoman. In 2017, Blue Rose publishers signed me on for a humble poetry collection, which was brought out last August.

It is standing at this juncture, that I would like to share with you a few simple things I have picked along the way.

1. As Joseph Pearce remarked, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” Remember that it is blind Homer who created the word portrait of the female fatale, Helen of Troy, who is still remembered in literature as the most beautiful woman ever born. His blindness was not his barrier; he exploited his freedom from the material perceptions of beauty around him to paint Helen in every colour and tone that he imagined to be beautiful. He did not stick to definitions, he redefined them. His unconcern for the response of his peers, his aloofness to the scope for ridicule, disbelief, and questioning – his audacity to be the sole and singular authority governing his creative space – is reflected in every unique immortal signature of Helen as a character.

Speaking of Helen, I think another topic that baffles us when we sit to write, is characterisation. On one hand we find characters that live and breathe around us long after we have closed the books, while on the other we find ourselves mostly crumbling mounts of paper into the bin writing characters that seem to do nothing more than act mechanically. One useful way to work our way is to read our favourite characters more carefully again. Try to understand what a character is “doing” when he/she is not disclosing to you anything at all through his dialogues. Every character is the idea of a person, woven in a multitude of layers. For example, a villain like ‘Iago’ from Shakespeare’s Othello never discloses much of his villainy through long lines. His powers are in his ability to come alive in our imagination; not through a string of lines he utters but through how we imagine him to move, to frown, to act – and for this to work, he must speak only where it becomes absolutely imperative for him to speak.

2. Irrespective of whether you are writing realistic fiction, magical-realism, fantasy or any other genre, you never know where the most crucial inspiration can hit you. Never close your eyes or ears to the stories around you. It takes many threads to write your own story, and more than one of them could be happening right in front of you, without even your realising it. Notice that which is apparently common; things as simple as a change in the colour of a person’s face, a certain way in which he/she walks or waves their hands, can make the character more real than just the dialogues which they speak. Like EL Doctorow puts it, “Good writing evokes sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining but the feeling of being rained upon.”

3. Before you decide that you want to be a writer, make sure that you want to choose to see beyond what is obvious, seek reasons where they are easier to be ignored, show audacity where cowardice is best expected of you, walk alone where you could simply jump into the bandwagon, and make a decision to discover the biggest themes in the most trivial of things.

4. As a writer, you are the living, breathing form of numerous characters. For each of these characters to thrive and exist, you need to know how each of them would feel, express, act and react in the most artless of situations. That is why you would never be able to be a writer by being only that one person sitting in front of a blank paper or screen and staring into emptiness. That is why you would always need that 9-to-5 job, the subway crowd, another look at that beggar on the pavement, or exchange a smile with the dog you meet on your way home.

Finally, I do not mean to say that any of this is going to be, or has been, easy. It would be unfair and deceptive on my part to say that writing will put everything into place, because even saying that you will be able to write every time you feel like it would be hollow inspiration. And from whatever little introduction I have had to writing, I think I understand that hollow inspiration is the last thing you want at the moment. So I would rather remind you that it is going to be tougher than you can imagine, and possibly more painful than you thought it could ever get. You will have to face rejection from the ones who have put up with you through your worst till that point, you would be turned down and branded a failure. But as JK Rowling said, “When you hit the rock bottom, make it your strongest foundation.” It is okay to fail; just make sure that when you fall down six times, get right back up seven. Pick up the pen to be your greatest companion and at the end of the day, you are sure to find that, though it may not get you money or publishers, it will give you the joy of a freedom so absolute and deep, that very few things in mortal life can compare to it. As for whether it is all worth the trouble, I have no proven answer. But I could give you my opinion; and that would be that it is worth all of it and so much more.